Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology

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Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology

Thomas J. Csordas

Abstract If psychoanalysis and phenomenology are thoroughgoing, comprehensive, and complementary

accounts of subjectivity, anthropological analyses of subjectivity can benefit from them both as well as from the

dialogue between them. In the first part of this article I present and elaborate a preliminary outline of conceptual

correspondences between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. These are pairs of ideas that seem intuitively to

“go together” on either a parallel level of analysis or in terms of the role they play within the broader intellectual

movement. In the second part I call attention to a preexisting body of work that explores the relation between

psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This is work in phenomenological or existential psychiatry that developed

sometimes as a synthesis of the two fields, and sometimes as a critique of and alternative to psychoanalysis. I

conclude by suggesting that anthropology is a field sufficiently fertile for such a cross-pollinated mode of thinking

to take root. [anthropology, subjectivity, psychoanalysis, phenomenology]

In the spring of 2008, I attended two conferences, one week apart. At the first someonestood and said that they were moving away from cultural phenomenology and towardpsychoanalysis because of inadequacies they sensed in the former. At the second conferencesomeone stood and said that they were going to become a cultural phenomenologist asa way to get out of psychoanalysis. Having already accepted the invitation to discuss therelation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis at the Emory conference which wasthe immediate precursor of this dialogic collection, I was pleased that events had conspiredto endow me with an opening anecdote. To my mind, the significance of the back-to-backdeclarations is to suggest that there is a kind of symmetry between these two intellectualpursuits that constitutes a mutual invitation from one to the other, and in this article I placeconsiderable emphasis on this symmetry.

First, however, I must comment on one apparent element of asymmetry: why did bothspeakers feel a need for an adjective to modify the term “phenomenology”—why did theyboth refer to “cultural phenomenology” but not to “cultural psychoanalysis?” Perhaps theasymmetry suggests a feeling that there is an implicit vagueness in phenomenology relativeto psychoanalysis. There may be a sense that phenomenology specifies method withoutcontent, or more precisely that the subject matter of phenomenology is so all-encompassingthat it requires a qualifier, whereas the content of psychoanalysis is given relatively moreself-evidently in the domain of unconscious psychic conflicts. But it is not incidental thatthe key phrase is cultural phenomenology instead of the phenomenology of culture. Afterall, anthropology does not provide the content and philosophy the method. What is atissue instead is convergence of an ethnographic and a phenomenological sensibility, an

ETHOS, Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp. 54–74, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. C© 2012 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2011.01231.x

Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 55

attunement to the immediacy of experience. I admit to having a vested interest in thisterminology, since I have been using the phrase cultural phenomenology to describe oneaspect of my own work. To me the phrase means on the one hand using phenomenologicalmethod, phenomenological concepts, or phenomenological sensibility in the interpretationof ethnographic data, and on the other hand using ethnographic instances as the concrete datafor phenomenological reflection. This being said, in what follows I attempt to elaborate myintuition of symmetry between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, in part by highlightingcorresponding terminological pairs from the two traditions, with the aim of enhancing thepotential for dialogue between them within anthropology.

If psychoanalysis and phenomenology are symmetrical intellectual pursuits, one element ofthat symmetry is that they share a deep concern for the relation between science and subjec-tivity. Phenomenology is an effort to establish a philosophy that can be a rigorous scienceby becoming fully aware of the subjective conditions of knowledge, and psychoanalysis isan effort to understand psychic life on the basis of scientific principles, a systematic studyultimately grounded in our biological nature. Neither is adequately described as a science ofsubjectivity, and there is no simple agreement on the nature of the subject, but the messageof both is that any science that eschews the subjective element is inadequate as science.Because of this fundamental congruence, in contrast to what was implied by the conferencespeakers I mentioned in opening, there is in principle no necessity to give one up in orderto pursue the other, and in fact a dialogue between them is both inevitable and necessary.1

In this spirit I first address the relationship between psychoanalysis and phenomenology ingeneral. I do so briefly in terms of encounters between adherents of the two movements,then in somewhat more detail by juxtaposing concepts within them that appear to pertainto similar levels of analysis. I then proceed to examine a specific instance of synthesis in thework of phenomenological psychiatry, considering the contributions of Ludwig Binswangerand Medard Boss in particular. I conclude with several remarks on the implications of ashared agenda for phenomenology and psychoanalysis within anthropology.

Dialogical Partners

There are a number of ways to initiate a dialogue between psychoanalysis and phenomenol-ogy, some more or less relevant to anthropology.2 One could undertake an intensive com-parison of the works of Freud and Husserl, contemporaries who nevertheless did not directlyaddress one another’s work, or one could conduct an analysis of all the variants and schoolsgenerated by the two movements. Each of these approaches would require a sustained anal-ysis whose relevance to anthropology could only be assessed upon their completion, and myambition in this article must be considerably more modest. One could also examine com-mentaries or syntheses attempted by members of one movement or the other, and concreteinstances of dialogue between adherents of the two movements; this will be considerablymore enlightening in the short term, though here I can only point to some of this work.Spiegelberg (1972) has observed that such interaction was far more common and productivein the French than in the German phases of the two movements. It is certainly relevantthat Paul Ricoeur (1970) brought his phenomenological sensibility to bear on the oeuvre

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of Freud, particularly given the influence of Ricoeur’s understanding of interpretation onGeertz and the widespread influence of his work on narrative. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’scareer long interest in psychoanalysis has been observed (Phillips 1996; Slatman 2000), andSlatman attributes to him a mature attempt to formulate a psychoanalysis of nature thatamounts to an integration of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, blurring the distinctionbetween conscious and unconscious, and virtually equating intentionality and desire.3

Perhaps of greatest consequence in this respect is the relatively sustained dialogue be-tween the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (e.g., seeLacan 1961, Merleau-Ponty 1964), both of whom have made a significant mark on con-temporary anthropology. Here I can only point to a small but intriguing literature thatexamines this dialogue. Most comprehensive is Phillips’s (1996) outline of the decades longinteraction, including the axis of disagreement due to the consequences of their respectivestarting points in consciousness and perception versus the unconscious and language, andMerleau-Ponty’s perspective that psychoanalysis should be considered one among a varietyof approaches versus Lacan’s that psychoanalysis required a comprehensive reformulation ofcontemporary thought. O’Neill (1986) compares the approaches of the two thinkers on theinfant’s encounter with a mirror, treating the origins of subjectivity in terms of self–otherrelations, infantile passivity and narcissism, and postural identification and schema. Shep-herdson (1998) offers an interpretation of Lacan’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s posthumousbook, The Visible and the Invisible, emphasizing their differing understandings of the gaze andthe flesh in relation to a theory of the subject.

As valuable as it would be to extend a consideration of the dialogue between Lacan andMerleau-Ponty, for present purposes I will adopt another strategy, which is to present anoutline of conceptual correspondences between phenomenology and psychoanalysis fromthe standpoint of an anthropologist interested in both. I formulated these pairings withoutan explicit method and with awareness that my own knowledge of psychoanalysis and phe-nomenology is limited—in other words, by intuition. However, this intuition was guidedby the two criteria that the pairs of ideas seem to “go together” on either a parallel level ofanalysis or in terms of the role they play within the broader intellectual movement. Then Iasked myself what I mean by these intuitive pairings. Some are obvious, others contestable.The pairings do not exhaust the main concepts of either phenomenology or psychoanalysis,and in some cases it is open to debate whether they are best described as parallel, symmet-rical, overlapping, convergent, or contradictory. Thus the following can be taken only as anincitement to further discussion (see Table 1).

The first pair is that which at the conceptual least common denominator defines the overtgoal of each intellectual movement. Phenomenology is descriptive, and what it describes arephenomena, meaning everything that exists or can possibly exist for us as humans. Psycho-analysis is therapeutic, and what it treats are pathologies, meaning conditions of emotionaldistress or developmental frustration. This initial statement is of course too simple.4 Withinphenomenology there can be what we can call two stances toward the descriptive task,namely transcendental and existential. Husserl said that the term “transcendental” refers to


Table 1. Conceptual Correspondences between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis

Phenomenology Psychoanalysis

Descriptive TherapeuticAlways beginning Never endingExistence UnconsciousEssence Conflict, complex, imagoDasein EgoImmediacy/ Presence Memory/ReminiscenceIntersubjectivity Transference/Object relationsEmbodiment BiologyIntentionality Drive/instinctBeing-in-the-world Human natureHorizon DefenseEpoche and Reduction Dream interpretationImaginative free variation Free association

“the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, themotif of the knower’s reflecting upon himself and his knowing life . . . the motif of a universalphilosophy which is grounded purely in this source and thus ultimately grounded” (Husserl1970:97–98). The existential stance is more directly concerned with description of the lifeworld or world of everyday life, the phenomena encountered in the course of existence andbeing-in-the-world. Likewise there can be what we can call two methodological orientations,namely reflective and hermeneutic. Reflective phenomenology is a direct examination of thecontents of consciousness or, leaning on the basic structure of intersubjectivity to put oneselfin the shoes of another, a reflection on the consciousness of another person. Hermeneuticphenomenology is an examination of phenomena treated in the manner of texts which canbe inhabited or lived-into, elaborated and explicated.

Within psychoanalysis, treatment can be carried out under a topographical model, a struc-tural model, an economic model, a conflict model, an object-relations model, or an inter-subjective model. We can also observe that the method is not always only applied to thesuffering of an individual in a treatment setting, such that we can say that there is not onlytherapeutic but theoretical psychoanalysis. In the latter category we are familiar with psycho-analysis in the study of literary texts, in certain kinds of cultural and media studies, in workon psychosexual development and personality, psychohistory or psychoanalytic biography,and ethnography that looks for Freudian themes and dynamics or applies psychoanalyticconcepts.

The second contrast is in part tongue-in-cheek because it is based on stereotypes of phe-nomenology as always beginning and psychoanalysis as never ending, which neverthelesshave an important common basis in the nature of human experience. Most of Husserl’sworks were programmatic and indeed framed as introductions to phenomenology. In amore pedestrian sense, phenomenological works sometimes seem to spend so much timelaying out their theoretical position and methodological concepts that the real work of analy-sis is never engaged. Anthropology, with a richness of data, has the potential to complete this

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program. In this task anthropologists should remain cognizant that phenomenology doesnot require a different kind of data, but is “a manner or style of thinking” (Merleau-Ponty1962:viii) with which one approaches data. That psychoanalysis has no ending is not simply astereotype based on the often-years-long process of treatment. Beyond the criterion of suc-cessful resolution of transference, it is also an actuality based on the difficulty of determiningwhat constitutes a cure and the careful negotiation of treatment termination. In both cases,when phenomenology appears to be always beginning and psychoanalysis appears never tohave an ending, each taps into the open-ended character of life that allows one to recognizestillness and stasis not as peace but as constant movement and change, not as chaos but aslife itself.

This consideration is in accord with the pairing of existence and unconscious as terms thatdefine what I call the ground, terrain, or field upon which phenomenology and psychoanalysiscarry out their respective intellectual agendas. They occupy parallel levels of analysis insofaras existence and unconscious identify not a content but a locus; they are not “about” existenceor the unconscious, but their entire problematic is predicated on these open-ended zonesof life activity. In elaborating this point, it is not very useful to say that the two conceptshave different scope in the sense that there is nothing outside, beyond, or over againstexistence in the same way we could say that the unconscious can be distinguished fromthe conscious.5 It is more useful to say that they constitute two styles of approaching themeaning of being human, insofar as both are defining features of what distinguishes humanbeing from the nonhuman. For psychoanalysis the contents of the unconscious are typicallyhidden or inaccessible while for phenomenology the elements of existence are typicallytaken-for-granted or nonthematized. In both cases the method is to bring these contentsinto the light of day and understand their consequences for peoples’ lives.

What are the contents to which we have just referred, the objects of these two modesof understanding? For phenomenology they are essences. Because of the recent history ofanthropology we have to introduce this concept with some caution. Essentializing an identityor a category is not the same thing as describing the essence of a phenomenon. Essence isa kernel of human meaning at the intersection of all possible takes on the phenomenon,the description of what it is in all its modalities across all imaginable contexts, and in itsdistinctive relations with other phenomena that can be understood as more or less discreteand distinct from the phenomenon of interest. On the other hand, essentializing as it has beencritiqued in anthropology stands for the attribution of something universal and immutable.Thus in phenomenology, and particularly in cultural phenomenology, the goal is not todefine the “universal essence,” but to describe the “essence of the particular.” That is to say,essence does not reside in a general class of phenomena but in the concrete instance of aphenomenon; it is not described as a catalogue of shared traits but as the unique instantiationof a trait; there is no universal essence of humanity but the particular essence of you or me ashuman. The essence of the particular opens out upon the intelligibility of existence as truth.

Now, to find a psychoanalytic concept that corresponds on any level to this one is a chal-lenge; I am uncertain as to whether there is such a concept, or whether my knowledge


of psychoanalysis is simply inadequate to find one. It may also be that different schoolsof psychoanalysis diverge on this issue whereas various forms of phenomenology are moregenerally in agreement about the study of essences. Given these reservations, I venturethat insofar as psychoanalysis is fundamentally concerned with intrapsychic development,what is at issue is the outcome of ongoing attempts to resolve the underlying conflictswhich determine that development. Again, it may be more appropriate to say that thepsychoanalytic notion of the complex is the equivalent of the phenomenological essence,and is embedded in the unconscious as the essence is embedded in existence. This read-ing perhaps also depends on an early Lacanian definition of the complex as dominated bycultural rather than instinctual factors (Lacan 1938:6), where the complex reproduces areality of the environment at a certain developmental stage, and this fixed reality is calledinto play and further conditioned by subsequent experiences. Yet again, insofar as the La-canian complex admits of being at least partially accessible to consciousness, perhaps theequivalent of the essence is the fully unconscious representation labeled the imago whichLacan calls “the fundamental element of the complex” (1938:6). This is as far as I canfollow this thread, since the next series of questions would take me into consideration ofwhether one must define imago as potentially positive or necessarily negative, as distillationor distortion of experience, as individual (e.g., the maternal imago) or collective (e.g., thearchetype).

If for a moment I can say that the objects of phenomenology and psychoanalysis are essencesand imagos respectively, then what are their subjects? Here we can be relatively confidentabout pairing dasein and ego, noting that dasein comes from the Heideggerian branch ofphenomenology and ego is most strongly associated with a certain phase in the developmentof Freud’s thought. The pairing makes sense because dasein does not simply translate as anabstract “being-there,” but can be used with the indefinite article to denote a particular be-ing there. Yet the term dasein connotes something more inchoate, preliminary, and holisticwhereas one tends to think of the ego as not only already formed but analytically distinguish-able from id and superego; and indeed one might need to include the full id–ego–superegotrinity as a better match for dasein.6 Phenomenology and psychoanalysis also have favoredways in which the dasein and ego engage temporality. To be precise, the dasein is typicallydescribed in the mode of immediacy and presence in the face of existence and the world ofeveryday life. The ego is treated in the mode of memory and reminiscence to reconstructthe unconscious processes in which it was constituted and continues to act.

With respect to sociality, the key concept for phenomenology is intersubjectivity. The de-bate is whether intersubjectivity is experientially and ontologically prior to subjectivity, withanthropologists in particular tending to favor the primacy of the intersubjective both be-cause of an intellectual predisposition toward shared meaning and social interaction, andas a way to sidestep the solipsism which in some instances creeps into phenomenologi-cal discourse. Psychoanalysis does not foreground a general concept equivalent to inter-subjectivity, but places considerable emphasis on specific experientially salient forms ofintersubjectivity. Transference and countertransference are critical components of intersub-jectivity between analyst and analysand, object relations describe the unconscious grounds of

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intersubjectivity among emotionally consequential others, and projection is an example ofdistorted intersubjectivity in the ego’s immediate social milieu.

The next pair of parallel concepts has to do with the stance toward the body, whereinthe position of phenomenology can be summarized in the term embodiment and that ofpsychoanalysis by biology. For phenomenology, embodiment does not denote a process inany sense such as that meaning is put into the body or that experience is filtered through thebody, but refers to the primordial condition of human existence. In this respect it is not justthat the body or its sensory experience is a phenomenon to be studied, but that embodimentis the essential ground of existence and experience. For psychoanalysis, biology is not justa condition of experience but the starting point for understanding because all experience isultimately conditioned or determined by biology.

The difference is not merely a matter of emphasis reflecting Husserl’s background as aphilosopher and Freud’s as a medical doctor, but an important consequence of Freud’sexplicit espousal of a natural science position that psychic reality is grounded in neurobiology.Coordinate with the embodiment–biology contrast, in the domain of motivation broadlystated the central concept for phenomenology is intentionality whereas the parallel conceptfor psychoanalysis is the drive. Intentionality is a global concept not limited to the specificintention associated with an action but a kind of tension in relation to the world or atending toward engagement in the world. It is a going-out to the world and connecting toit through innumerable “intentional threads,” as Merleau-Ponty was wont to say. There isa kind of tropism implied in the phenomenological notion of intentionality, but more ofa kind related to an inherent vitality (as Brentano, a teacher of Husserl, might say), ratherthan to an autonomic response as with the heliotropism of a sunflower. The drive, on theother hand, is predicated on biological instinct. It is a genetic rather than an existentialcharacteristic of the human species, and originates in a place that connects to our animality.It also implies a kind of tension, but more of a kind suggestive of the buildup of pneumatic orhydraulic pressure than of taut muscles reaching toward another or engaging in movement,and certainly more explicitly focused on the attainment of pleasure and the satisfactionof desire. At the most general level of conceptual contrast, for phenomenology the bodyaffords a particular mode of being-in-the-world, adding a strong measure of specificity toconsideration of existence and the dasein. For psychoanalysis the body connotes a particularunderstanding of human nature as determined by biological evolution, in the manner thatwas espoused by the generation of psychoanalytic anthropology defined by scholars such asGeorge Devereux, Weston LaBarre, and Melford Spiro.

The next conceptual pair I have juxtaposed are the phenomenological notion of horizon andthe psychoanalytic notion of defense. My rationale is that in some way both terms define akind of experiential limit. The importance of horizon is evident in its literal sense for thephenomenology of perception, but perception is not the only human phenomenon that hasa horizonal structure, and these others can be considered metaphorical only in the narrowsense that the basic idea is designated by a term borrowed from visual distance perception.Thus we can talk in a very concrete sense about an emotional horizon, an intellectual horizon,


a horizon of creativity, a horizon of aspiration and so on. The horizon is a moveable limitthat depends entirely on a person’s perspective and position and is constantly readjusted inaccordance with the person’s movement in the world. There is always a horizon, but it isalways in principle possible to find out what is on the other side. If there is something “onthe other side” for psychoanalysis, in the absence of psychoanalytic intervention the defenseprevents one from arriving there. The defense masks, walls off, or distorts an experience andits emotional consequences, and most precisely it is a foreclosure of experience. In distinctcontrast to a horizon, it does not move with the movements of the person, and whereas thehorizon is an intrinsic part of the world’s structure, the defense is precisely a mechanism, anartifice constructed and self-imposed on the psyche. It not only prevents one from arriving atthe emotional truth of a specific developmental moment or life experience, it often impedesone’s ability to move in other domains such as emotion, intellect, or aspiration.

Two final pairs of contrastive concepts have to do with method. First, in phenomenologya privileged place is given to the epoche and reduction, and in psychoanalysis an equallyprivileged place is given to dream interpretation. Each method is in its own way concernedwith sorting through the residue of consciousness and the secondary baggage of experiencein order to attain an essential kernel of experiential truth. This is a truth profoundly boundup with the perspective of an individual subject, but far from being solipsistic it is the casefor both phenomenology and psychoanalysis that the most unique, private, and idiosyn-cratic moment opens out onto the universal human panorama, and moreover is ultimatelyreinserted either descriptively or therapeutically into the life context that produced it. Theepoche is often described as a bracketing, suspension, or abstention of the world of everydaylife in order then to reduce a phenomenon to its unencumbered essence—in anthropologythe term best names the process of identifying and thematizing the taken-for-granted.7 Themethod could just as well be described as a methodical taking apart and putting back togetherof a phenomenon to see precisely how it works, like a curious child dismantles and reassem-bles a clock to see what makes it tick. Something similar could be said of psychoanalyticdream interpretation, where nothing is taken at face value as multiple levels of meaning arepeeled away like the layers of an onion, and a jumble of images is spread out as if on a tableso that particularly meaningful images can be isolated and examined for their emotionalconsequences.8

A second methodological pair is the phenomenological technique of imaginative free vari-ation and the psychoanalytic technique of free association. With as much spontaneity ascan be mustered or tolerated, the phenomenologist concentrates on the phenomenon ofinterest reduced as far as possible to its existential core, while the psychoanalytic patientconcentrates on his or her immediate state of emotional sensibility. The phenomenon issubjected to the imaginative equivalent of studying a stone by turning it over and over inone’s hand, feeling it and viewing it from all possible angles, and furthermore seeing it fallfrom the clouds, lie silently in a dark cave, be worn by millennia of flowing water, becomepart of a rustic stone house or an imposing cathedral. The essence of the phenomenon isto be found at the intersection of all its possible contexts and associations, to the point oftesting the limits of reality and feasibility. It is precisely the limits of reality and feasibility

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that are of utmost concern in psychoanalytic free association, since it is the patient’s grip onreality and the emotional feasibility of his or her mode of life that are most at stake therapeu-tically. In this sense the valence of the phenomenological technique is shifted toward purepossibility while that of the psychoanalytic technique is shifted toward fantasy; said anotherway, phenomenology in this respect engages the imagination while psychoanalysis taps theimaginary. For phenomenology there is a methodical engagement of the imaginative processto supplement spontaneity, and this measured approach stands in contrast to the feeling inpsychoanalysis of either apprehension that nothing will come up or that one will be delugedwith tangled ideas and feelings. The attitude of free variation is to leave no stone unturnedand the potential pitfall is interpretive incompleteness or lack of closure, whereas the attitudein free association is that something is being avoided and the potential pitfall is foreclosureof meaning.

Phenomenological Psychiatry

The second part of my contribution is to call attention to a preexisting body of work thathas already posed our question of the relation between psychoanalysis and phenomenol-ogy. This is work in the area of phenomenological or existential psychiatry that developedsometimes as a synthesis of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, sometimes as a critiqueof and alternative to psychoanalysis. For the present I will take only a small first step in astudy of this area, touching on the work of Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist anddirector of the Bellevue psychiatric hospital who received his medical degree under CarlJung and served his internship under Eugen Bleuler, was a friend and correspondent ofFreud, and a colleague of Heidegger who invited his colleague Heidegger to lecture at hishospital; and Medard Boss, also a Swiss psychiatrist who trained under Eugen Bleuler, readBinswanger, was associated with Jung, friends with Heidegger, taught by Karen Horneyand Kurt Goldstein, and analyzed by Freud. This exercise will be of use first in addressingthe theoretical grounds of the convergence between psychoanalysis and phenomenology,second in its relevance to our empirical interests in psychiatric anthropology and culturalinfluences on psychopathology, and third in the light it can shed on how the methodologicalintersection between phenomenology and psychoanalysis can help define what is at stake inthe anthropology of experience.

Binswanger’s essay “Dream and Existence,” originally published in 1930 (Binswanger 1986)and known as the first substantial work in existential psychiatry, is like a sonata in threemovements. The first part closely examines the existential theme of rising, falling, andhovering in dream imagery, particularly as manifest by birds soaring and falling dead, butalso as modulations in sensuous and erotic feelings, fading and intensifying of light and vision,or sensations of flying and hovering. This existential theme is the same as that appearingin poetry or everyday language when one expresses disappointment by phrases like “fallingfrom the clouds” or “having the rug pulled out from under one’s feet,” and it points toan element of subjectivity that is objectively shared and helps define the meaning of beinghuman, or as Binswanger says, “the who of our existence.”


This starting point is one step removed from, or one step prior to, the Freudian locus ofdream analysis in the individual ego and its unconscious. However, this locus is strictlyspeaking neither biology nor language. In the first instance, the idea is that the imagery isrooted either in the living structure of the organism or an “asthenic affect” that takes theform of falling as a physical model: “According to this view, our falling from the clouds orthe giving way of ground beneath our feet is a purely analogical or metaphorical transferencefrom the sphere of the body to that of the mind, and within the latter it is simply a picturesqueform of expression without genuine content or substance, a mere facon de parler” (Binswanger1963:223). This position, revived several decades later by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson(1980) is unsatisfactory to Binswanger. In the second instance, Binswanger remarks in theopening paragraph that “it is language that ‘envisions and thinks’ for all of us before any oneindividual brings it to the services of his own creative intellectual powers” (1963:222). Yet,although this statement appears to grant language a determinative status comparable to thatgranted by Foucault to discourse and discursive formations—and I will return to this pointmomentarily—there is something even more basic than language at issue here:

When, for example, we speak of a high and a low tower, a high and a low tone, highand low morals, high and low spirits, what is involved is not a linguistic carrying overfrom one existential sphere to the others, but, rather, a general meaning matrix inwhich all particular regional spheres have an equal “share,” i.e., which contains within itthese same specific meanings (spatial, acoustic, spiritual, psychic, etc.) . . . language ofitself . . . grasps hold of a particular element lying deep within man’s ontological struc-ture . . . Language, the poetic imagination and—above all—the dream, draw from thisbasic ontological structure. [Binswanger 1963:224–225]

Binswanger’s position here is that there is not simply a linguistic carrying over or extensionfrom biology to other domains; and neither is language itself given a more privileged statusthan the poetic imagination or the dream. Instead, biology participates in, and languagegrasps hold of, a basic ontological structure that is the ground of human existence.

The second movement of Binswanger’s dream sonata changes keys and discusses the dreamin ancient Greek society. Many of the images are still of birds in flight, but the existentialstructure is markedly different. There is no necessary distinction among the dream as sub-jective process in the dreamer’s psyche, the signification of an event in the external world,and the pronouncement of an oracular cult. This is because the subject source of all threeis one and the same—Zeus—and thus all three form an “inseparable unity.” Binswangerelaborates:

Where do we hear any talk of an individual subject and where, then, is the possibilityof the ontological grounding of that individual? And who can say here whether truth isto be sought in the inwardness of subjectivity or in the outwardness of objectivity? Forhere all “inner” is “outer,” just as all outer is inner. It is thus of no consequence whetheran oracular event follows upon a dream or bears no connection with it—just as oftena dream alone, without the oracular, can express the will of the godhead. [Binswanger1963:237]

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One might be tempted to say in Foucault’s terms that ancient Greek discourse constituteda different regime of truth of dreams—but we must be wary of this position, and again weshall return to the reason why it is of interest in a moment. In the early Greek imageryBinswanger finds “no mention of rising and falling in the sense of the life-flow of a particularindividual,” but instead “The individual, the species, fate, and the godhead are intertwined inone common space” (1963:238). Likewise there is no contrast between inner and outer suchas emerged with Neoplatonism and remains characteristic of contemporary psychology,but instead there is “the opposition of night and day, darkness and light, earth and sun”(Binswanger 1963:238). More than a discursive regime of truth that is incommensurablewith that of the contemporary world, what is of interest for Binswanger is “that we find inthis existential space—which differs so markedly from our own—so clear a manifestation ofthe ontological structural element of rising and falling” (Binswanger 1963:238).

In the third movement, Binswanger arrives at the problem of individual subjectivity, citingthe doctrine (associated with Heraclitus, Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger) thatit is a distinct mode, type or way of being human and stands in a particular relationshipto the communal, the universal, and the intersubjective world of mutual understanding.In this view image, feeling, subjective opinion, and doxic form stand in contrast to mind,objectivity, truth, reflective thought, and Logos. Life according to individual understandingor private thoughts is dreaming regardless of one’s physiological state, and only a sensibilitythat grounds one in the universal human–divine community of understanding can be calledawakeness. In this state of awakeness Binswanger interprets Hegel’s understanding of “thespirit as an individuation of objectivity: it is not singular in its universality” (1963:243). Heimmediately makes this abstract insight concrete by referring to psychoanalysis, in whichthe patient “must decide whether, in pride and defiance, to cling to private opinion—hisprivate theater, as one patient put it—or whether to place himself in the hands of a physician,viewed as the wise mediator between the private and the communal world, between deceptionand truth” (Binswanger 1963:244). The therapeutic process does not relieve the patient ofimages, feelings, wishes, and hopes, but removes them from the sphere of despair and descentto that of ascending and even soaring life by “reclaiming objectivity in subjectivity” throughauthentic resolution of the transference. Where Binswanger claims to go beyond Hegel is torecognize with Kierkegaard that here we are not dealing with objective but with subjectivetruth, “with the ‘innermost passion’ by virtue of which subjectivity must work itself throughobjectivity (the objectivity of communication, consensus, submission to a superpersonalnorm) and out of it again” (Binswanger 1963:245).

Binswanger asserts that these issues remain dormant in Freud’s theory of transference be-cause of his attempt to derive human spirit from instincts rather than recognizing that thesetwo concepts are incommensurable and each belongs to its own proper sphere. He feels thatJung’s theory of individuation is stronger, but it too remains unsatisfactory because it doesnot adequately take into account the contrast between image–feeling and intellect, whichcontinues unmitigated both in the notion of the collective unconscious and that of the self.From here he returns to the initial theme of disappointment as “falling,” feeling that “I


didn’t know what hit me,” and where in Heidegger’s terms “Dasein knows neither the ‘how’nor the ‘what’ of the happening” (Binswanger 1963:247).

Binswanger ends with a crescendo in one of the most profound statements that is simulta-neously about the ontology of dreaming and about life lived in a dream in their relation toanxiety. “To dream means: I don’t know what is happening to me” (1963:247). The dreamerawakens to selfhood only when she or he decides to determine “what hit me” and further-more to “take hold of the dynamics in these events . . . to bring continuity or consistencyinto a life that rises and falls, falls and rises” (1963:247). Here the person finally goes beyondmere dreaming as “life-function”—that which, once again to invoke Foucault, is the primarysubject of biopolitics—and creates “life-history.” In the final analysis these are again justas incommensurable as are instinct and human spirit; nevertheless, the transition betweenthem is gradual and indistinct because, and most importantly, they share a common base inexistence.

The reason I have made occasional allusion to Foucault in my exposition of Binswanger’s ex-istential theory of dreams is that Foucault’s first published work as a doctoral student in 1954at age 28 was an “Introduction” to Binswanger’s essay (Foucault 1986). It will be worthwhileto spend a bit of time with this Introduction, which is twice as long as Binswanger’s piece,not only because Foucault starts with acknowledgment that Husserl’s Logical Investigationsand Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams were published only one year apart (1899 [Husserl 2001]and 1900 [Freud 2010], respectively), but that from our current stance there is somethingamusingly gratifying to imagine being able in 1954 to describe Foucault as a “brilliant youngphenomenologist.” In addition, Foucault uses the term anthropology to describe his under-taking, and defines it in such a way that we can recognize the common ground betweenphilosophical anthropology and cultural anthropology. For him, the theme of anthropol-ogy “is the human fact, if one understands by ‘fact,’ not some objective sector of a naturaluniverse, but the real content of an existence which is living itself and is experiencing itself,which recognizes itself or loses itself, in a world that is at once the plenitude of its ownproject and the ‘element’ of its situation. Anthropology may thus call itself a ‘science offacts’ by developing in rigorous fashion the existential content of presence-to-the-world”(Foucault 1986:32). In this context, Foucault lauds Binswanger for his ability to continuallycross “back and forth between the anthropological forms and the ontological conditions ofexistence . . . bringing to light, by returning to the concrete individual, the place where theforms and conditions of existence articulate” (1986:32). Foucault’s fascination with the essayon dreams is in Binswanger’s gamble that existence can be understood by examining themode in which it is least engaged with the world. This approach goes beyond a hermeneu-tic of symbols toward comprehension of existential structures, and furthermore impliesa whole anthropology of imagination requiring a new understanding of how meaning ismanifest.

In setting up the exposition of how Binswanger’s dream theory implicitly surpasses Freud,Foucault makes the critical observation that “Freud caused the world of the imaginary tobe inhabited by Desire as classical metaphysics caused the world of physics to be inhabited

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by Divine Will and Understanding: a theology of meaning, in which the truth anticipatesits own formulations and completely constitutes them. The meanings exhaust the reality ofthe world which displays that reality” (Foucault 1986:35). One can see here a foreshadowingof the argument that later led to a critique of the repressive hypothesis in the history ofsexuality, as well as the notion of the discursive constitution of regimes of truth, but herefollowing Binswanger the critique of Freud takes a different direction. Foucault formulatesthe problem as that Freud analyzes the dream only in its semantic function, leaving itsmorphological and syntactic structure in the dark, and again in Saussurian terms that thedream has only the status of speech to the neglect of its reality as language. He argues that“The imaginary world has its own laws, its specific structures, and the image is somewhatmore than the immediate fulfillment of meaning” (Foucault 1986:35). In this he is clearlyalluding to the ontological structure identified by Binswanger, and he carries on to say thatFreud is ultimately unable to handle the relationship between meaning and image despitehis analysis of the mediating functions of repression and fantasy. In Foucault’s view, thisis probably because of an inadequate concept of symbol as the point of contact betweenimage and meaning, inner world and external world, unconscious impulse and perceptualconsciousness. This gap has been exaggerated in the development of psychoanalysis as afield, with Melanie Klein on the side of image attempting to determine meaning solely fromthe movement of fantasy, and Lacan on the side of meaning attempting to identify in theImago the essential movement of language.

Foucault then asks whether Husserl offers a theory of the symbol that can successfully re-instate the immanence of meaning to the image. The answer is yes, because unlike psycho-analysis, Husserl distinguishes between the index elements of which the symbol is composedand which designate an objective situation, and the signification of meaning such as incestu-ous desire or narcissistic envelopment which constitute the dream experience from within.Furthermore, phenomenology does not make the psychoanalytic mistake of assuming animmediate identity between meaning and image, but instead finds their common groundin the expressive act, or to be precise in the immediacy of the expressive act insofar as thatact opens a horizon of additional meaning, or meaning somewhat different from what wasexpected. In this specific respect the difference in the two approaches is that

Freudian analysis could see only an artificial connection between meaning and expres-sion, namely, the hallucinatory nature of the satisfaction of desire. Phenomenology, onthe contrary, enables one to recapture the meaning in the context of the expressive actwhich founds it. To that extent, a phenomenological description can make manifest thepresence of meaning in an imaginary content. [Foucault 1986:38]

The critical point in this last comment, however, is not that phenomenology is ultimatelysuccessful, for it ends up stranded in the imaginary. The conclusion is thus that psychoanalysishas never succeeded in making images speak, while phenomenology has succeeded in doingso but has given no possibility of understanding what they say. Still, taken as a “twofoldtradition,” phenomenology and psychoanalysis pose the problem of a common foundationto objective structures of indication, significant ensembles, and acts of expression. This,


Foucault says, is what Binswanger tried to bring to light, though without ever saying soeither explicitly or implicitly.

Foucault had more to say than this, but I want to move on to a brief consideration of therelation between psychoanalysis and daseinanalysis as conceived by Medard Boss. Boss madean explicit distinction between psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalytic theory, holdingthat the sensibility of daseinanalysis was much more in harmony with the former than withthe latter. His enthusiasm for the compatibility of Heidegger’s approach to being and Freud’stherapeutic stance is somewhat undercut by the fact that the positions explicitly articulatedby Heidegger are most often asserted by Boss to be implicit in Freud. Nevertheless, there aresome interesting points here. The central insight they share is into “existence as being of thenature of a primordial openness and lucidity. No thought of unveiling hidden phenomenacould have occurred in Freud’s mind without his tacit awareness of man’s existence as anopen, lucid realm into which something can unveil itself and shine forth out of the dark”(Boss 1963:62). Boss gives an extended discussion of how this tacit insight is displayed inFreud’s insistence that patients lie down during treatment, allowing the patient to loosenup physically with all limbs horizontal and thus on a hierarchically equal level, to neutralizeself-assertion and create the possibility for the patient to be “totally delivered up to himself”such that infantile impulses emerge in complete openness without the obstruction of aface-to-face adult relationship. According to Boss, Freud as therapist also transcended thenatural science attunement to cause and effect and implicitly achieved a Daseinanalyticvalorization of meaning and sense in the form of a life history that verged on a Heideggerianunderstanding of fundamental human temporality. He also sees similarities between Freudand Heidegger in their conceptions of humanity in relation to morality and in the centralityof language as the “home of Being-ness.”

Perhaps most significant to Boss, however, is the commonality he perceives in their con-ceptions of human freedom. For Heidegger, freedom was the ability to choose or renounceengagement in meaning-disclosing relationships to other beings, and this “freedom in theDaseinanalytic sense is the condition for the possibility of psychoanalytic practice as taughtby Freud” (Boss 1963:67). Yet both Heidegger and Freud saw that humanity “basically andcustomarily avoids independent, responsible selfhood” (Boss 1963:68) and that living in thelucidity of existence—what from Binswanger I also call awakeness—required overcomingwhat Freud tellingly called resistance. To encourage freedom and openness, the relation be-tween analyst and patient for Freud becomes an almost limitless “playground” (Tummelplatz)where all the patient’s possibilities for relating come out into the open. The silent analystas a “mirror” is not cold and glassy but ultimately respectful of patient’s individuality andwary of obstructing his or her freedom. Finally, Freud insisted that the stance of the analystnot be one of “intervening” care but of “anticipating” care based on being quietly “aheadof the patient in his existential unfolding” so that the patient can become “transparent tohimself and free for his existence” (Boss 1963:73). Boss feels that he has decisively made hiscase when he points out that the terms “intervening” and “anticipating” are applied directlyfrom Heidegger’s description of the two kinds of existential care.

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Boss devotes a much longer discussion to the critique of psychoanalytic theory from aDaseinanalytic perspective. He is unequivocal in arguing that through rigid adherence toa natural science approach Freud destroyed the immediate and primary understanding ofhumans acquired in practice in a “truly catastrophic fashion.” In his theoretical approach,Freud objectifies the psyche into a reflex mechanism that operates by the cathexis anddischarge of libidinal energy, bisects the mutually caring therapist and patient relationshipinto the medical observer and observable object, and introduces a further split amongpsyche, body, and world that not only precludes their being recombined but leads to afurther dissection of humanity into a multiplicity of psychic elements (e.g., instincts, partialinstincts, id–ego–superego), while the external world can be reduced to mere stimuli. Whiletransference and resistance are real observable phenomena in treatment, theoretical ideassuch as the brain as an isolated organ or the notion of “act of consciousness” are conceptualabstractions beholden to prescientific presuppositions. Freud’s theory and much of thatoffered by his followers remain inadequate from the stance of Daseinanalysis because insofaras they do not allow us adequately to “understand man’s essential nature as being of meaning-disclosing, elucidating character, we remain unable even to understand how someone is ableto perceive a fellow man as a fellow man, let alone how he could enter into so-calledinterpersonal relationships” (Boss 1963:80).

Boss proceeds to examine a series of concepts beginning with that of an “idea,” or psychicobject representation, which he regards as an abstraction predicated on an equally abstractentity called the “psyche.” Instead of an analysis of neurosis that begins with the idea ofa tree, Boss wants to back up and start with the immediacy and authenticity of a tree asa being. It is not that humans don’t have ideas, but that we are not certain what an ideaactually is, and therefore the “idea” is not an appropriate starting place for understanding.He moves next to the hypothesis of an unconscious and psychic topography. The significantdevelopment was transformation of the insight that unconsciousness can be a property of amental phenomenon into an entification of the Unconscious as a psychic locality or system“with properties and laws peculiar to itself” (Boss 1963:88). The situation becomes moreobscure when consciousness is then explained in terms of the unconscious, as the surface ofa psychic apparatus that allows for an abstract “capacity” for becoming aware which is muchmore simply understood as direct “evidence of man’s primary openness and awareness,which, in turn, is the very essence of his existence and never merely the property of anunknown X” (Boss 1963:92). Boss then makes the bold claim that Daseinanalysis rendersthe Unconscious superfluous, making it unnecessary to go beyond immediate experience“because it has not prejudged a whole host of phenomena according to an arbitrary decisionas to the nature of the world and reality” (1963:94). Boss will not brook a question of theform “where does an idea go when it goes out of awareness.” With some convincingnesshe presents Daseinanalytic interpretations of the way in which one is existentially “with”another being when thinking about an idea, as well as in terms of posthypnotic suggestion,everyday parapraxes, pathogenic factors, and symptoms in neurosis. These interpretationsdispense with the unconscious and related notions of depth and surface, psychic localityand entity, replacing them with existential openness and closedness, presence and absence,


complete existence and partial observation, light and darkness, concealment and disclosure,freedom and unfreedom.

Boss examines the notions of psychodynamics and drives by pointing out that the mechanisticunderstanding of force or energy that motivates in pushing one from behind or below doesnot account for what in existence may be attractive and draw one toward engagement andcaring. Here again he argues for the inadequacy of a causal approach as opposed to anattempt to understand the meaning-disclosing relationships of an explicitly human world.In addressing the domain of emotions, Boss distinguishes between affects such as anger andpassions such as hate, and observes that their status is no less abstract than that of ideasunless we acknowledge that from an existential standpoint we cannot say they are objectivethings such that we have anger but that we are angry as a particular manner of being open tothe world, a state of attunement or resonance with the world. Repression in Freud’s sensedoes not exist at all according to Boss, and in the example of a young girl who had receiveda prudish upbringing and developed a hysterical paralysis upon being smitten with a youngman, he argues that “a ‘repression’ of thoughts and emotions into an ‘unconscious’ can beunderstood much more adequately as the inability of an existence to become engaged inan open, free, authentic, and responsible kind of relationship” (1963:120). Transference isnot the shifting of an entified affect from one person to another, but bespeaks a genuineand primary relationship between the analyst and patient, and if the adult neurotic treatsthe analyst like a father it is because his development remains so childlike that “he is opento the perception only of the father-like aspects of all the adult men he encounters” (Boss1963:124). Likewise, a paranoid delusion is not the result of projection of an internal affectonto the outside world, but the consequence of a fundamentally immature existence thatcannot handle its life-situation and really experiences it as threatening or “poisonous;”similar arguments can be made about “introjection” and “identification” (Boss 1963:126–27). Finally, Boss understands Freud’s interpretation of dream images and symbols—andhere I return to the ground covered by Binswanger—as an attempt to undo or reversethe mechanisms of “dream-work” at the superficial level of the dream’s immediately givencontent, judging dreams by the standards of the waking state as composed of isolated symbolsin the form of mere pictures or “images” within a “psyche.” Instead, he asserts, dreams havetheir own mode of both being-in-the-world and being open to the world that is “an equallyautonomous and ‘real’ way of existing—i.e., of an understanding, meaning-disclosing relatingto what is encountered” (1963:128–29).

Implications for Anthropology

My aim in this article has been to help prepare the ground for further discussion by tracingthe conceptual outline of a relationship between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, andthe roots of an earlier movement that placed the two schools of thought in direct dialogue. Ifin fact they are thoroughgoing, comprehensive, and complementary accounts of subjectivity,anthropological analyses of subjectivity can benefit from each of them as well as from thedialogue between them. In the first half of the article, for example, this premise led to

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juxtaposing the “immediacy” of phenomenology with the “memory” of psychoanalysis. As aresult it was possible in the second half of the paper to see Binswanger’s understanding thatone “chooses” mental illness emerging at this level of experiential immediacy in such a wayas to deepen and problematize the concept of agency. Likewise it is possible to see in Boss’sanalysis of experiential immediacy the transcendence of the very categories of depth andsurface as primary referents of subjectivity, broadening the existential repertoire to includeoppositions such as openness and closedness, presence and absence, freedom and unfreedom.Such considerations do not do away with the psychoanalytic concern with depth but help tocreate a balance in the conceptual relation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology.

At the beginning of this discussion I commented on the terminological asymmetry betweenpsychoanalysis and cultural phenomenology. In closing I want to offer a similar brief reflec-tion on the phrases psychoanalytic anthropology and phenomenological anthropology. Theformer has unquestioned temporal and substantive depth within anthropology, evocativeof scholars including Roheim, Devereux, Mead, La Barre, and Spiro along with the entireschool of culture and personality, generating a body of scholarship summarized in extensivearticles (Paul 1989; LeVine and Sharma 1997), and for a period (1978–87) even sustaining aJournal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. The same cannot be said of phenomenological anthro-pology, where one is hard pressed in previous decades to find more than Hallowell’s (1955)use of the term phenomenology “for want of a better word,” Geertz’s (1966) somewhatstrained application of Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology to Balinese culture, and the seldomread work of Bidney (1973). At present, however, the relative retreat of psychoanalysis inthe face of an aggressive neuroscience and the relative advance of phenomenology with theassertion that experience is a legitimate topic of analysis has resulted in a situation in whichthe two approaches are more equally matched as dialogical partners. This is evident in thetenor of recent anthropological work on both sides (Corin 2010; Fischer 2007; Heald andDeluz 1994; Jackson 1996; Katz and Csordas 2003; Molino 2004; Moore 2007), though asyet there has been little explicit dialogue or synthesis.9

For anthropology, psychoanalysis has always been put to use for interpretive rather thantherapeutic ends regardless of whether the material being analyzed originates in the clinic,while phenomenology has found its appeal among those interested in the interpretationof experience as well as of symbol systems and culture analogized to text. The encounterbetween psychoanalysis and phenomenology per se has also largely been in an interpretiveregister, more precisely understood as the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophywhere phenomenology has been the most willing philosophical interlocutor for the Freudiandiscipline, creating a philosophy of psychoanlysis and a consideration of the implications ofpsychoanalysis for philosophy. From this perspective the dialogue about interpretation is atthe same time a privileged instance of the relation between anthropology and philosophy.I would go so far as to say that it allows one to appreciate that the questions asked byanthropology and philosophy are the same. These are questions having to do with meaningand experience, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, embodiment and desire, language andself, emotion and imagination. The difference, and a critical one by all means, is that


anthropology poses these questions in terms of the particular kind of empirical data producedby ethnography.10

In the present essay I have attempted, by demonstrating a conceptual complementarity be-tween psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and by examining attempts to synthesize them inphenomenological psychiatry, to suggest that there is nothing to prevent their collaborationfrom taking place. Anthropology is an ideal locus for such an intellectual enterprise, andpsychological anthropology in particular stands to benefit from an alliance of two powerfulmethodologies as it turns increasingly toward analysis that transcends individual subjectivityto encompass larger social processes (Biehl et al. 2007; Good et al. 2008; Jenkins 2011).For a phenomenologically informed psychoanalytic anthropology this does not have to berestricted to reiteration of the culture and personality maxim that neurosis is to an individualwhat religion is to a culture, but can be extended to an analytic appreciation of the sometimestraumatic and sometimes imaginative consequences of repression and its imminent irruptioninto social reality. For a psychoanalytically informed phenomenological anthropology thisdoes not have to be limited to an incremental extension of face-to-face intersubjectivity towider social domains, but can enhance analytic appreciation of experiential immediacy andboth its interpellation to action and its sedimentation into cultural forms. The diversityamong contributors to this collection indicates that there is no one definitive form thatthis enterprise is obliged to take, but the field is fertile for such a cross-pollinated mode ofthinking to take root.

THOMAS J. CSORDAS is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, SanDiego.

Notes1. Spiegelberg observes the virtual simultaneity of these movements’ emergence in the Germanic cultural milieu,

noting that Husserl’s Logical Investigations appeared in 1900–01 and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in 1901

(1972:127).

2. See, for example, the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center (1988), Askay and Farquhar (2006).

3. Although he lectured on psychoanalysis and philosophy, Merleau-Ponty did not publish an extended analysis,

but has left a number of intriguing comments worthy of repetition. In a preface to a book on Freud by his colleague

Hesnard he writes, “Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward

the same latency” (1982–83:67). In the working notes at the end of his posthumous The Visible and the Invisible he

writes “A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology” (1968:267)

and “Hence the philosophy of Freud is not a philosophy of the body but of the flesh—The Id, the unconscious—and

the Ego (correlative) to be understood on the basis of the flesh” (1968:270). These statements are pregnant with

significance.

4. In his comments at the Emory conference, Michael M. J. Fischer suggested that the term liberatory be substituted

for descriptive on the phenomenological side. I would rather say that liberation is a shared existential goal underlying

the descriptive and therapeutic methodological goals of the two intellectual styles, or perhaps that description and

therapy represent different types of dispositif liberatoire. Certainly psychoanalysis attempts to liberate people from

constraints and conflicts that forestall maturity and perpetuate anxiety, while phenomenology’s concern is nowhere

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more evident than in the trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) Phenomenology of Perception toward its ultimate

chapter on freedom.

5. In my view the consequence of pairing existence and unconscious instead of conscious and unconscious is that

in the latter case one might more easily be led to the question of the degree to which conscious and unconscious

overlap, whereas in the former one might be inclined to ask whether the unconscious determines existence or

whether existence encompasses the unconscious.

6. This may not be adequate either, since one may argue that the id–ego–superego trinity more aptly name the

self than dasein, and that a closer approximation would be the subject’s simultaneous engagement with what Lacan

(1998) labeled the symbolic, imaginary, and real.

7. See also Throop (this issue).

8. Freud’s 1900 Interpretation of Dreams (2010) could even today be a valuable primer for an anthropology applicable

to dreams, ritual, myth, and culture in general from the standpoint of bodily experience, morality, symbolic process,

memory and desire, and the relation of consciousness and the unconscious.

9. One exception is the explicit synthesis of psychoanalysis and phenomenology in the anthropological work on

psychopathology of Ellen Corin (1998; Corin et al. 2004).

10. Anthropology shares equally important thresholds with other discplines, of course. History and ethnology,

for example, can be characterized as asking the same questions about development and diversity with the former

emphasizing time and the latter space.

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